Contents

Ensuring singlethreaded behaviour

In certain situations, it's vital to ensure a single thread of execution.

One way may be to create one thread to which you send closures containing code to be executed, and which returns the responses through a mailbox mechanism, there's an example implementation in the Gambit manual.

Ways to get Gambit execute completely single-threaded is:

Use (thread-quantum-set! (current-thread) +inf.0)

Use (##disable-interrupts) and (##enable-interrupts) in Scheme or ___EXT(___disable_interrupts)() and ___EXT(___enable_interrupts)() from C.

Please note that Gambit's I/O system makes use of the scheduler, and threading routines do this also, so don't do read, write, thread-sleep!, thread-yield! etc. in code you intended to execute single-threaded.

Export and import C symbols

Gambit's gambit.h provides helper macros for exporting functions and variables. They are ___EXPORT_FUNC(type,name) and ___EXPORT_DATA(type,name), and are used like ___EXPORT_FUNC(int,five) () { return 5; } . Grep lib/*.c of the Gambit sources for EXP_FUNC and EXP_DATA to see examples.

On Windows, exporting and importing functions and variables from C code may be particularly tricky. Check out the Microsoft-provided __declspec(dllexport) and __declspec(dllimport).

Using gsc to compile and link a dynamically loadable object file that uses external libraries

Here is an example of building a dynamically loadable Gambit object file that uses FFTW. This example is on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.2 on x86-64.

The program uses the FFTW version 2 API, so we downloaded fftw-2.1.5.tar.gz, untarred it and configured it with

You need the --enable-shared option because shared Gambit modules must be linked to shared external libraries. I set the --prefix to install the final FFTW libraries and header files in my home directory.

The file fftbasics.scm provides the basic interface between the Scheme code and FFTW; it is as follows:

The first option (-I/export/users/lucier/local/fftw-2.1.5/include) tells gcc where to find the header file fftw.h at compile time. The second option (-L/export/users/lucier/local/fftw-2.1.5/lib/) tells the linker where to find the FFTW library (-lfftw) at link time (i.e., when building the file fftwbasic.o1 from fftwbasic.o), and the third option (-Wl,-rpath,/export/users/lucier/local/fftw-2.1.5/lib/) tells the dynamic loader ldd where to find the FFTW library when fftwbasic.o1 is loaded into gsc.

Aside: Note that if the headers and libraries are in a standard place known to gcc, and the location of the shared library is already in the path of the dynamic loader, then these options may not be necessary. In many GNU/Linux systems, for examples, nearly all packages are installed in /usr/{bin,include,lib}, and you may not need to pass these special options to gsc.

Finally, recall from the the Gambit manual that anything you can do with gsc on the command line you can do with one of the gsc-specific scheme procedures compile-file, compile-file-to-c, link-incremental, or link-flat. Thus, one could build fftbasic.o1 by